Don Winslow

Police departments are always a reflection of the society that they serve. Is there such a thing as 'police culture?' Absolutely. Is that culture isolated form the surrounding society? Absolutely not.

I've been around the surf culture since I was a kid. I grew up in a beach town in Rhode Island. Then eventually I lived in Dana Point, Calif., a real surf hotbed.

It's funny because I think that genre literature can be looked down on by literature literature. And I like that! I like being scorned; I like people looking down their noses at us a little bit... It gives us a little chip on our shoulder.

Well, if you're writing a thriller, you have to have your character in mortal jeopardy on page 1 or it's not a thriller.

The tragedy is that the police and inner city communities should be allies. Who suffers most from violent crime in America? Inner city communities. Who has a personal and professional interest in lowering that violence? Cops.

I lived in mafia neighborhoods off and on when I was a kid. If you were in Little Italy, in East Harlem, in Brooklyn... Those neighborhoods were, in those years, dominated by mafia families. You knew it and you felt it, you know?

I was very influenced by films and books like 'Serpico,' 'The French Connection,' and 'Prince of the City.' They were some of the reasons I became a crime writer.

There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.

Producing words isn't a problem for me. And I usually write two books at a time. When one horse gets winded, you jump on the other.

I get started at 5:30 in the morning and write till 10 A.M. Then I hike six or seven miles before going back to work.

Police work in major cities - and New York is no exception - has always been vulnerable to corruption. Teddy Roosevelt built his career on it.

I start work at 5 in the morning and I have a wicked insomnia problem.